Thoughts
I wish there was like a pay-per-post option for online news sites. Because paywalling your content doesn't make sense when I've clicked a
single link from Reddit or Hacker News. I want to read that one article, not sign up for a re-occurring monthly subscription.
The issue is that in order to do this, you also have to offer me a good user experience. You can't open a full-screen popup after I've scrolled half-way down the page. It needs to be more pleasant than reading the site with ads (because ads are the other option for monetizing drive-by users.)
The thing news companies need to recognize is that they can't do content curation anymore. Like, the music industry did an amazing job in letting Apple sell individual songs for the iPod. We're skipping that for some reason, and trying to jump straight from "buying physical collections" (records, or newspapers) to fragmented subscription marketplaces.
Apple Music/Spotify works because a, both platforms have all music, and b, people already know what artists/songs they want to listen to. The news industry right now looks like if the free tier was Pandora with ads, and every record label has their own subscription service.
Unfortunately, this is also how streaming video platforms look right now. So I don't have a lot of hope that news will figure out how to fix it.